RS

FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

Bill Burton petulant about CIA photo goof.

You know, I don’t really expect anyone from this administration to be gracious, or even polite, to either Republicans or conservatives. It’s nice when it happens, but by and large the the executive branch doesn’t like us, they downright hate having to pretend that they do, and they get petulant about the whole thing. So if it had been Brother Caleb or Michael Goldfarb asking this question, I’d expect that Bill Burton would be a bit of a schmuck about replying.

A photograph posted by the White House to the photo sharing website Flickr includes an image of a document with the letters CIA printed beneath what appears to be the word “secret.”

[snip]

The other words on the visible portion of the document aren’t easily legible, and a White House spokesman, Bill Burton, dismissed it as innocuous in an email.

“Uh oh. Please don’t tell me that the enemy is now going to know what our fax coversheets look like. (That is indeed what it is.),” he emailed.

Aside from the fact that, actually, we don’t want the enemy to know what official fax cover-sheets look like – apparently, Burton is ignorant of the term ‘trashing‘; God only knows what he thinks ‘social engineering‘ refers to – this wasn’t a particularly gracious answer, particularly since the White House thought that the situation was important enough to remove the photo anyway. Also, given that (as Ben noted) something like this cost a British counterterrorism officer his job earlier this month, you’d think that this might have resulted in a more serious response.

I’m being sarcastic, of course. Nobody mentioned in this piece really expected any better from the White House.